Blue, orange and white - that is the color scheme of the new WordPress administration panel. Why are they changing the theme? No clue - from what I’ve seen, so far, it reminds me of an earlier Blogspot admin panel, for some reason. Maybe it’s the use of the orange that makes me think that. I quite like the current design of the administration panel in WordPress, though…I’m a little dissapointed that they aren’t staying with it and building from it, for congruency’s sake. That’s just me, though - there will be plenty who applaud this change and I’m sure I’ll embrace it as well - I’m just a damn creature of habit! Heh.

At this time, the two big changes in the top menu in the Administration Panel is:

• Presentation is now labeled “Design”
• Options is now labeled “Settings”

A little known.. and little used.. cool little feature in WordPress is the ability to use custom fields. I have to admit that I was a WordPress user for quite some time before I realized how cool this little tool can be. This post explores some of the possibilities of using custom fields in the WordPress.Org (self-hosted) software.

You can display all sorts of things:

• Current mood
• Currently reading
• Currently listening to
• Todays weather

These small tid bits of information can be added to the bottom of each post easily through the use of Custom Fields.

But first - where do you find custom fields?

In your WordPress administration panel, click “Write” then scroll down, beneath the text box where you write your post and you will see a blue bar with the words “Custom Fields”…. click the plus sign in the top right-hand corner of that blue bar and you see the following:

Please update now.

What am I speaking of?? The version update feature that is packaged in the new 2.3.+ version of WordPress. I heard about it in the buzz about the new version in the weeks prior to it being released. Now that WordPress 2.3.1 is out - I’m seeing it in my WordPress Dashboard and it looks like this:

This nifty feature tells you when your WordPress software is out of date and a new version has been released. This is really nice, especially for those who don’t keep updated on such information on a regular basis.